Hi everyone, we're a K-12 district exploring options to replace SolarWinds Web Help Desk, mainly because of increasing costs. We have about 1,400 users and 85 helpdesk agents who handle roughly 100 to 150 tickets daily. Currently, we're considering self-hosted or open-source solutions like GLPI, Zammad, and osTicket. Has anyone made the switch from SolarWinds to one of these systems? I'd love to hear about your experiences with scalability, migration, Active Directory or LDAP integration, and long-term maintenance. Any feedback or recommendations based on real deployments would be super helpful!
5 Answers
If you’re in the K-12 space, consider Incident IQ. It's specifically designed for schools and might have features that fit your needs really well!
Have you thought about SolarWinds' Service Desk? It’s reported to be a much better option than the Web Help Desk. I had experience with it for a district with over 5,000 staff, and it worked great! Though, I know it’s not a perfect match for every situation.
I switched from SolarWinds to JIRA Service Manager recently. It was a good move since we already had JIRA Software. Setting it up had some initial hiccups, but nothing too terrible! We couldn’t carry over old tickets directly due to the different fields, so I just saved WHD tickets as PDFs for reference. Active tickets were re-entered into JIRA before the switch. It’s been smooth sailing since!
Wow, a 1:16 user to helpdesk agent ratio really stood out to me! That’s quite a load! I guess just to clarify, your 85 agents actually manage tickets while the 1,400 users just create them, right? Sounds like a solid setup if everything runs smoothly!
We actually replaced multiple SolarWinds products with NinjaOne, including their helpdesk. Their ticketing system works well for us, plus their OS patching is way better than WSUS. They offered a good deal to switch to their cloud, which definitely helped!
Yeah, that ratio is pretty eye-opening! It's good that your setup allows for granular access to manage tickets without overwhelming the agents.